I can still hear the creak of the floorboards beneath my feet, the way they groaned like old bones ready to snap. Our house never felt alive — not really. It was just a hollow place with walls too thin to hold in warmth and shadows too deep to ignore. Even now, when I think back, I don't know if it was the house or the people inside it that were more broken.
They weren't cruel — not in ways that people understand. My mother never raised her voice; she just let it fade until her words disappeared altogether. And my father… he didn't hit me or yell. He just existed, heavy like a stone, silent as the grave. When I was a kid, he carved little wooden toys for me. I remember the smell of sawdust, how his hands moved with a kind of careful patience I never saw anywhere else. He never asked if I liked them. I guess I never told him.
That's how it always was with us. Unfinished. Unsaid.
When I brought home bad grades, my mother would sigh. That soft, tired kind of sigh that made me feel like I'd broken something important, even though she never said what. "Do better next time," she would whisper, her back turned, stirring some watery soup that didn't taste like anything.
And my father? He'd just sit there, staring at the flickering TV like it was the only thing holding him together. I wanted him to look at me — just once — with something more than emptiness in his eyes. But he never did.
The day I found the locks changed, I think part of me broke. It wasn't that they locked me out — it was the way my mother opened the door, her face blank, her voice hollow.
"We thought you weren't coming back," she said.
Not "I thought".
"We". Like they had talked about it. Like they had planned for a world where I was gone.
I wanted to scream, to ask why, to demand an answer that would make it all make sense. But all that came out was a whisper. "Why would I leave?"
She didn't answer. She handed me a plate with a slice of stale bread and a glass of water. I took it. I ate it. And the bitterness sat in my stomach like a stone.
They weren't monsters. That would've been easier. Monsters are simple — you fight them or you run from them. But my parents? They were just people. People too tired, too broken, too lost to love me the way I needed.
The next morning, I stared at myself in the cracked mirror. I didn't like what I saw. A boy with too many shadows in his eyes. A kid with fists clenched so tight his knuckles turned white. I wasn't waiting for anyone to save me anymore.
If no one was coming, I'd do it myself.
I started small. I cleaned my room, not because anyone told me to, but because I could. I finished my homework, not for praise, but because I was tired of failing. I stopped asking for permission to exist. I stopped waiting for kindness that was never coming.
I taught myself how to breathe through the pain, how to stand up even when it felt like the ground was crumbling beneath me. I became the architect of my own survival.
And somewhere in the silence, I found strength. Not the kind that comes from power, but the kind that comes from endurance. The kind that says, I am still here, even when no one else is.
I wasn't whole. I wasn't fixed. But I was mine.
And that was enough.
that's where my story truly started. Not with a hero. Not with a rescue. But with a boy standing in the dark alone, trying to figure out how to build something new with hands that never learned how.
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